Currently, there is huge demand for converged mobile devices which combine data, telephony and other function capabilities. Technological advances such as extremely low power consumption, improvements in form factor, pricing and co-existence technology for various wireless standards, e.g., 802.11 (WLAN) and Bluetooth, are fueling the demand.
A block diagram illustrating an example prior art multifunction mobile device in a wireless network system is shown in FIG. 1. The example wireless scenario, generally referenced 10, comprises a plurality of mobile devices 12 in communication with a cellular base station 14. The mobile device 12 comprises several functions in addition to the basic cellular transceiver 26, including a Bluetooth radio 18, FM receiver 20, GPS receiver 22 and WLAN radio.
As technology advances, more and more functions are being integrated on the same chip, e.g., Bluetooth, Global Positioning System (GPS), Wireless LAN (WLAN), etc. Historically, even when multiple functions were integrated on the same chip, each function had a different dedicated host interface with an associated driver.
A block diagram illustrating the prior art multifunction mobile device in more detail is shown in FIG. 2. The mobile device, generally referenced 30, comprises a multifunction device 32 in communication with host processor 34. The multifunction device comprises several functions each having its own separate host interface (which may sometimes be a different type), including Bluetooth radio 36, associated antenna 31 and host interface 44; GPS receiver 38, associated antenna 33 and host interface 46; FM receiver 40, associated antenna 35 and host interface 48; and WLAN radio 42, associated antenna 37 and host interface 49. The drawback to this is the requirement of providing a separate host interface for each function with the consequent increase in pin count, power consumption and die size (for the host interface logic circuitry assuming a single host interface chip is used) as well as increased complexity of host software due to the need to support multiple (and sometimes different) host interface drivers to connect to each function in the multifunction device.